Throughout “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Arnold Friend is a very intimidating and mysterious character that is hard to figure out. Arnold knows everything about Connie, a teenage girl that he has never met before. He is very persistent with getting Connie to run away from her awful teenage life at home with him. Arnold’s appearance adds even more mystery to who he actually is. Arnold has a roughed up look to him, a secret code painted on his car that can be interpreted as a Bible verse, and he can not stand steady on his feet, because of all of these attributes Arnold appears that he is possibly Satan.
Arnold seems like the typical teenage cool guy with his roughed up look. In this short story, Joyce Oates says, “She recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even the slippery friendly smile of his, that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn’t want to put into words” (Oates 5). Connie knows
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The convertible is very beaten up, with words painted all over the car. As Arnold is showing Connie the car, he comes across a group of letters. The letters on his car read 33, 19, 17. Arnold says to Connie, “Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey” (Oates 3). 33, 19, 17 can be interpreted in different ways, which make the numbers suspicious and intriguing. The most mysterious way these numbers stick out is if it is looked at it in a biblical context. Judges is the thirty-third book from the end of the Old Testament, and chapter nineteen in Judges is about a man who takes a woman away from her home to be his mistress. This man in Judges is not a good man and has Satan in his life. Judges 19 relates to “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” because Arnold tries to trick Connie into leaving her family behind so he can show her what real love feels like. Judges
At the end of the movie, a stranger named Arnold Friend encountered Connie at her home while she was home alone. Arnold was a vicious, but alluring character. The way he dressed was as if he tried to imitate a young teenage boy. First, his intentions for Connie were kind of blurry. Connie, being as
A spider, a zombie, a serial killer, all of these things would scare most but why do people pay good money to be scared by all these things? Because people like to be scared. Ever since people could speak to one another, they have been telling these stories. whether it be around a dim lit campfire, in the form of a book, or even on the big screen. these stories stand out through time because of their graphic word choice, unique characters, and suspense. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Joyce Carol Oates “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been?” both possess these elements of word choice and suspense along with psychotic like characters such as Arnold Friend (WAYG) and the narrator (The Black Cat). Poe's character the
Like all great stories throughout time, a compelling villain is the key to making a story worthwhile. In short stories like, “Where have you been, where are you going,” and, “Love in LA,” a though provoking antagonist was used by the authors to really give the stories some depth. The antagonist of, “Where have you been…”Arnold Friend takes on the persona of temptation to the protagonist Connie and really emphasizes the theme of be careful what you wish for. Connie was a young girl who repeatedly met up with older more mature boys; but one day Arnold Friend arrives at her house and coerces her to leave with him. The story abruptly stops there leaving the reader hoping for more. The antagonist of, “Love in LA”, Jake, an unemployed dreamer, meets the heroine of the story, Marianna, when he mistakenly hits her car on the freeway. From there, he proceeds to lie and do whatever it takes to make himself look better, and go out with Marianna. Both of these antagonists are similar in that both could have some underlying biblical meaning or connotation, both hit on younger, seemingly “innoce...
In fact, the Misfit regardless of the grandmother’s request and persuasion, and let her saw and listened her family by killed in the woods one by one. That is very cruel for a grand woman that her son and grandson died before her. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” Arnold Friend tried to attract Connie for many ways: be cool, a sunglasses, faded jeans, and boots; Tall and strong, a tousled hair, and a rock star style; A graffiti car, a despised by his friend, a very fashionable radio. That is a dangerous boy for the normal people, but very charming to a fifteen rebellious girl; Arnold Friend is very smart because he knew what she likes. He used a very
"Connie, don't fool around with me. I mean—I mean, don't fool around," he said, shaking his head. He laughed incredulously. He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig…” (Oates 6). Joyce Carol Oates’ short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” highlights an altercation, meeting, conflict and dispute between a teenage girl, named Connie, and a psychotic rapist named Arnold Friend. Throughout their altercation, Arnold Friend tempts and encourages Connie to get in the car with him and lead her to a variety of possible dangerous situations, one of which includes her getting raped . There is no doubt that Joyce Carol Oates’ uses Arnold Friend in her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” to symbolize the Devil and embody all of the evil and sinister forces that are present in our world. This becomes apparent when the reader focuses on how deranged Arnold Friend is and begins to
In “Where are You Going, Where Have you Been?” Joyce Carol Oates uses an allegorical figure of evil to illustrate the theme of temptation. Oates alludes to hell through the character Arnold Friend, as the devil, and his victim Connie, who invites him in by committing the sin of vanity.
He’s coming to get me” (8). In her vulnerability, Connie even seeks her parents despite previous efforts to distance herself, revealing her childish nature. This demonstrates a loss of innocence and a desire to return to the safety of childhood, as Connie realizes the danger of Arnold Friend. Despite her efforts, Connie is not ready for adulthood. In her pursuit of independence, Connie becomes entangled with a dangerously mature situation she is unprepared to handle. This parallels the loss of innocence many adolescents suffer as they venture into adulthood: many teens quickly lose their idealized vision of adulthood as they realize the challenges of adulthood. Connie’s confrontation with Arnold Friend is a metaphor for the loss of innocence all teens are confronted with as they seek maturity. Although the story encompasses a teenage girl's dangerous romantic rendezvous, it is more of an encounter with the expectations and reality of adulthood, through Connie's infatuation and later fear of Friend. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" is a metaphor for the loss of innocence teenagers face, as their idealized perception of adulthood
She immediately trusts him because they simply like the same radio station. The young girl has proven throughout the story that she is curious about sex. The reader also learns that she loves attention and Connie initially finds the attention that she is receiving by Friend to be rather flattering and the fact that she thinks he’s an older boy intrigues even more. Her fate though, seems to fit the extremist world in which she inhabits. A habitat where women are viewed by men as objects of beauty for their consumption. Connie later realizes that something is odd about Arnold. She notices that the slogans on his car are outdated. She notices his painted face, his wig, and his boots. Susan Nyikos was another writer that wrote an analysis on Where are you going, where have you been. She suggested that the reason Connie realized this was because he was only a figment of her imagination and that she had never awaken from her nap. Nyikos also noted that another critic stated that Arnold Friend was the devil and that’s what explained the hooves hidden by the boots. What Susan mainly argued was that “Like many of Oates's stories, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is based on real events—the story of a "tabloid psychopath known as 'The Pied Piper of Tucson'" whose specialty was the seduction and occasional murder of teen-aged girls,"
Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” tells the tale of a fifteen year old girl named Connie living in the early 1960’s who is stalked and ultimately abducted by a man who calls himself Arnold Friend. The short story is based on a true event, but has been analyzed by many literary scholars and allegedly possesses numerous underlying themes. Two of the most popular interpretations of the story are that the entire scenario is only dreamt by Connie (Rubin, 58) and that the abductor is really the devil in disguise (Easterly, 537). But the truth is that sometimes people really can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Connie, a victim of terrifying circumstance will be forever changed by her interactions with Friend.
Oates uses a great number of symbols in her short story "Where are you going? Where have you been? to create an aura of unease and Devilishness. Her principal symbols are Arnold Friend, his disguise, and the music Connie listens to. Oates' use of symbolism and Biblical allusions to Satan force the reader to raise an eyebrow to the character of Arnold Friend and the doomed future of Connie.
Christ," thinking about how terrible she looked" (3). Connie thought she distinguished the abstruse man in the driver's seat, the sort of gentleman she is accustomed to pulling in. She saw his hair as "shaggy, shabby dark hair… insane as a wig" (3). He slipped out of the auto, the storyteller tells that, "Connie preferred the way he was dressed, which was the path every one of them dressed: tight blurred pants stuffed into dark scraped boots, a sash that pulled his waist in and demonstrated how incline he was, and a white force over shirt that was a bit ruined and indicated the hard little muscles of his arms and shoulders" (5). These depictions ascribe to this specific subject in "Where Are You Going," Connie simply sees him as a kid that is pulled in to her and needs to take her out, in the same way as any kid might.
First, Arnold Friend’s physical traits portray him as Satan. Oates says that “There were two boys in the car and now she recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig and he was grinning at her,” (Oates 316). The hair could actually be a wig hiding something that he didn’t want someone to see. Maybe he was hiding his devil horns. Also when he was standing Connie had mentioned that “He was standing in a strange way, leaning back against the car as if he were balancing himsel...
The story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates is about a fifteen year old girl named Connie who has a strange encounter with a man named Arnold Friend. I agree with Joyce M. Wegs' interpretation of the story, that Arnold is symbolic of Satan.
One way that, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", is a perculiar story is how at Connies house, Connie tells him again to leave and then she fear strikes her as she grows a little dizzy when Arnold Friend begins to tell Connie where they are and what they are doing at that exact and precise moment. She gets very nervous when he tells her that he knows that they are at the barbeque at their neighbors house. Hearing this information and everything that this man knows, Connie grows extremely horrified, but also very fascinated by his precise description of what was happening. Connie wants to go into the house because Arnold Friend moves closer towards the porch ...
the lack of knowing her true self lets Arnold Friend overpower her in the end. The words and letters on Arnold’s car symbolize warnings that Connie should have picked up on. Because Arnold symbolizes the devil, the evil inside of him gives him advantages to manipulate Connie into leaving her house, despite everything inside of Connie screaming at her not to go. The symbolisms in these objects or people are all deeply rooted to the theme of this short story, “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?”.